-> That's frightening  you goy going on! :(

-> If it were me, I'd haul out the HDD, 

   
For a day I did.
Other precautions have been adaquate however.
As I'm currently running a Linux live CD in RAM booted CD-ROM
my hard drives are not mounted in the O.S. so no reads or writes
to them occur.

-> unplug the BIOS battery(for 48
-> hours, to totally drain the BIOS 
   
Won't work.
While the BIOS and CMOS are intimately related they are not one and the
same thing.                      
The BIOS resides in NVRAM ( non-volitile memory) that does not lose it's
settings in powerdown.
The CMOS is where cerain _settings_ used by the BIOS are stored
and that nenory does require power to retain settings.

-> in case the malware stashed a copy of
-> itself in the boot run proggies) then start fresh and just avoid
-> everything you'd been doing the week before getting infucted! :(

I had at least a ten year run without this sort of nonsense so I 
my time was due.
I will make some changes in protocols however no pain no gain applies
so I'll endure some risk for benefit.
At least I'm learning and adding some tools to my arsenal against this
sort of crud.

-> Sucks.

-> Good luck in recovery!

Thanks, well over halfway there.
Data recovery from the still somewhat affected system
requires I take some time before completing my housecleaning.
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5